Unsure what “social justice” means? Thomas Sowell shares your plight.
It has the prime virtue of political catchwords: It means many different things to many different people.
In other words, if you are a politician, you can get lots of people with different concrete ideas to agree with you when you come out boldly for the vague generality of “social justice.”
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that a good catchword can stop thought for 50 years. The phrase “social justice” has stopped many people from thinking for at least a century — and counting.
If someone told you that country A had more “social justice” than country B, and you had all the statistics in the world available to you, how would you go about determining whether country A or country B had more “social justice”? In short, what does the phrase mean in practice — if it has any concrete meaning?
In political and ideological discussions, the issue is usually whether there is some social injustice. Even if we can agree that there is some injustice, what makes it social?
